The Heart

Summer is the season of the heart and bitter is the flavor recommended to help with the transition into Summer. In Summer the main change in our practice is that we try not to sweat.

The average human heart beats about 3 billion times and then it stops. The logic of doing exercise which increases the speed at which your heart beats is that after you finish exercising your heart will beat slower than it would have if you hadn't exercised at all. So although you'll use up a whole bunch of beats in that hour of aerobics, you'll more than regain the number of beats you lost in the 23 hours until your next workout. If you exercise regularly it will likely take you more years to reach 3 billion beats.
It's a good theory.

My sister is a swimmer. She loves to race and she trains hard. One of the ways she trains endurance is that she will time herself swimming a given distance as fast as she can. She then immediately takes her pulse. Instead of trying to swim faster the next time, she tries to swim the same distance in the same time, but with a lower heart rate.

Chinese martial arts, particularly the internal arts of bagua, xingyi, and taijiquan, use a simular strategy during the summer months. We try to practice as fast as we can without increasing our heart rates. Some practitioners actually take their pulse in the "play the pipa" posture or another posture where the fingers go to the wrist. But that isn't necessary.

With a little practice it is possible to become very sensitive to the feeling of the pores of your skin opening and closing. You can in fact gain some control over this process, but simply monitoring your pores will tell you if your heart rate is increasing. Of course the pores open to release sweat, and that is what is meant by the proscription to "practice not sweating."

Another way to lower your heart rate, improve your stamina and perhaps lengthen your life span is to attend to the center of your palms. The acupuncture point on the center of your palm is actually about one inch in diameter. It is called the Laogong point (Pericardium 8) and it is associated with the heart. (The name Laogong means "palace of toil.") The center of the palm should remain relaxed. If it hardens, it is likely that your heart is working harder. You can feel your heart in your palms, you can feel an increase in blood surge. You can even feel your pulse continuously while you are doing the form, but that isn't recommended because it requires excessive concentration, which isn't very relaxing.
In bagua, xingyi, and taijiquan (most obviously in the movement lu), the center of the palm is actually pulled back. This can be done manually by expanding the elbow which creates a vaccum which then sucks the center of the palm back up toward the elbow. But that just helps you get the feeling. In actual practice the martial arts postures allow the heart to move effortlessly backwards and down (the kidneys move forward and up) creating a feeling of connectedness between your palms and your heart.

Note: There is no way someone with this knowledge could get carpel tunnel syndrome.

The Endocrine System

This week I'm taking a three day workshop on the Endocrine System with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen in Berkeley.

I'll have more to say about it after I've assimilated some of the material.  The one thing I am prepared to say now is that the endocrine system is a source of seemingly effortless power.  What in Chinese is called the kua, the area around the inside of the hips, includes the gonads.  It's the source of what we martial artist call cojones.

Useless Acts

"Nothing is ever a complete waste of time....

But some things come pretty close."

For some reason that quote helped me cope with the difficult emotions I had as an exchange student 23 years ago. I guess it was the "look on the bright side--with doubt" sense of humor.

All Jews eat matzos at Passover. The ritual act is rich in meaning, everyone agrees, but what that meaning is--is perpetually up for debate. For instance: When you are in a hurry, you don't actually have to let the bread rise. You can complete something without actually completing it. Freedom is more important than yeast multiplying.

In order to qualify as matzos the water and flower mixture must go into the oven within 18 minutes of touching water. Fair enough, whatever the meaning of the ritual is, speed and timing are key elements. But orthodox practice goes further. Water can not touch the wheat from the moment it is harvested to the moment it is in the oven.

So the wheat must be guarded the whole time. Seems like a useless job. If they gave it to me, however, I would use the opportunity to practice my gongfu.

My gongfu practice has gotten me through an enormous number of otherwise boring situations. I had a "maintenance" job years ago which was a 6 hour day, but I could do the work in 3 hours so the rest of the time I just practiced my gongfu in a large storage locker looking out over the water. I kept a broom to lean on nearby in case anyone came looking for me. I also got arrested in an airport once because the airport was completely fogged in and I could think of nothing better to do than practice my forms.

Surely one of the most useless thing I've ever done happened in Japan. I was with a group studying tea ceremony (along with budo, dance, & calligraphy) everyday for two months at a Shinto school which had us put on a slightly different outfit for each class. On this particular day the tea teachers had us come one hour early to learn how to clean the tea house.

Each of us got a job. They gave me a white plastic 5 gallon bucket filled with clear water and a scrub brush. Then they took me out into the garden and showed me a pile of medium sized smooth river stones. "Clean the stones," was my instruction, "I will return in 45 minutes." So I knelled down picked up a stone dipped my brush in the water and started scrubbing. But the stone was already perfectly clean.

After scrubbing a few stones in occurred to me that I had no idea how long I should scrub each stone. Since the stones were already clean, there was no intrinsic measure, I could have scrubbed one stone for the entire time or just scrubbed the air around all the stones. As were, I got to about my 30ith stone and realized that I hadn't made a separate pile for my "cleaned" stones, I was just as likely to be picking up a stone I had already scrubbed.

So I sat and scrubbed and thought about what meaning this act could possibly have. And then it occurred to me that it might have no meaning at all. That it was simply a useless act.

Yet tea ceremony, that day included, was a total joy to do. We don't actually need meaning to find fulfillment.
I think that lesson (a lesson I guess I taught myself) has served me well all of these years of martial arts training. I'm happy practicing without any goal or meaning, without achievement, or knowing why.

Call me unimaginative if you want, but I can not imagine why anyone would want to miss a day of practice. I guess uselessness reveals something about my true nature.

Sichuan Earth Quake

I wish to extend my deepest sympathies to the victims of the Earthquake in China.  I lived and traveled around Sichuan for two months in the Summer of 2001.  The people I met were wonderful.  Compared to the loss of life I'm reading about everyday, the two reports below are minor, but I thought my readers would like to know.
I visited Sanxingdui when I was there, I just saw this brief report:

Sanxingdui Ruins Museum, the age-old heritage site, became one of the victims of the Monday earthquake in western China.

I also received this email from a local Chinese herb importer, Emmanuel Segmen:

It's worse than we had imagined. If you follow the map north to Ganus
Province near to the Ming Xiang Mountain village where our dang gui
root comes from, you'll find the highways in ruins and the
communications lines down. I don't know how far that is, but it's at
least several hundred miles to the north by northeast from the
epicenter. We can't get our container of herbs down any road. The
agronomist in Gansu can not communicate with us. The people in
Lanzhou City think that maybe the roads will be passable by fall, but
no one is sure. Amazingly the land is crunched up quite badly up to
about 5 miles away from Lanzhou City. Good luck and good essence to
those living in Lanzhou. Amazing that infrastructure is wrecked 300
miles from the epicenter.

There are a lot of main growing sites that are out of touch right now
and possibly out of commission. Dang gui, gou qi zi, huang qi, huang
lian, tian qi and dang shen just to name the most obvious. We had to
go to those very mountains in western Sichuan Province to find clean
haung lian. It may be a long time before we see that herb again in
it's better format. It takes seven years to grow it.

My thoughts are with you Sichuan.

Hunch Back Masters

When Taijiquan was still new to Westerners, a few Masters claimed that the reason they had pot bellies was because they had so much qi.

We are wiser now. Relaxing the abdominal muscles and breathing into the the lower dantian is quite a change for some people, it may make some people feel fat, or even reveal a little extra flesh that was previously "sucked in." But needless to say at this point in history, cultivating qi will not give you a pot belly. Eating too many greasy donuts is and has always been the most likely cause of that.

But if you look at videos of old masters on, for instance, DPGDPG's Youtube page you'll see quite a few with hunch backs. Age itself causes bone degeneration, and no doubt some of these masters have suffered from starvation, spinal injuries or worse. Still I'm suspicious.

Could the hunch back be from bad training they participated in at some time in their lives? If that is the case, I would hope they let their students in on their errors so that these mistakes don't get passed on to future generations.

I've seen a lot of martial artists who take the weight of their arms in their upper spines. With higher level martial arts it is important that the practitioner takes none of his own weight in his or her joints. All the weight of the arms and head should pour down through the body so that there is no pressure on the joints or the bones.

Update: I wrote this blog about three months ago. I thought it was too mean so I hid it. But now that it resurfaced on it's own (I gave it a date way in the future) I think it's good food for thought--even if most masters don't actually have hunched backs.

Acupuncture Healthcare

My partner Sarah Halverstandt has just opened a new Traditional Chinese Medicine Clinic. If you are in San Francisco come on down for the party. I'll be giving a talk on the heart for about 20 minutes, there will be food, music, and free gifts.

What's new?

Acupuncture Healthcare Open House!! You are cordially invited to our Grand Opening Celebration! This Saturday, May 17th, from 2-5pm : 2146 B Sutter Street, San Francisco!

How do Kids Learn?

Because I perform several different sword forms I've gotten in the habit of explaining a little bit about dueling.  It is a nice tie in with History and teachers appreciate it.  The funny thing is, students already know what a duel is.  They often don't know it by name, but when I describe the type of thing a duel would be fought over, namely honor, and that every duel needs to have seconds (to enforce the rules and to fight themselves if the rules are broken)--elementary school students all recognize the "fair fight" so common on the school yard.

Students also know the difference between a matched or a fair fight and bullying.  Why do they know this? How do they learn it?  Is there something in our DNA?  Is dueling as natural as mothering?

I loved this book.

A Simple Question

I have a simple question for which I don't have a good answer.

Is brutality part of the art? Most, if not all, of the old masters used or experienced brutality in their training. Is it necessary or were they just crazy.

Buster Keaton, one of the greatest physical performers of the 20th Century, got his start with his parents in Vaudeville, which had a fair amount of slapstick. As a child aged 3 to 5 his father would drop kick him all the way across the stage. He would land on his butt facing down stage and make a face. The audience loved it.

A Korean martial arts master I knew described his early training this way.

I was a precocious child, so my parents sent me for a year to study martial arts with a group of monks. My training began in the mountains in the early Spring. After my parent had dropped me off one of the monks took me back out to the front gate, gave me a rag and told me to get down on my hands and knees and rub the ice off of the road. The ice was three inches thick. Periodically a monk would come outside to see how I was doing, offer criticism, and then kick me around on the ice a few times.

The thing is, none of us would choose this kind of brutality for ourselves, but this master was so fast he could catch a bullet with his hand--from behind!

Red Belt

I saw David Mamet's new film, Red Belt last night. I loved it. Great fight scenes too.

The star Chiwetel Ejiofor is a great actor, I just hang on his every word, he played the honor-obsessed interplanetary government Space Martial in Joss Whedon's Serenity, which I also loved.

This film is from the Theater of the Absurd tradition. The highly implausible changes that occur in the film are meant to further the metaphors which expand in significance through out the film.

Because there are so many important twists in the film, I'm not going to tell you what happens, but feel free to talk about the film's content in the comments section after you have seen it, and I will too.

As my regular readers know, I'm neither a big fan of Mixed Martial Arts, nor of Honor--and this film is about both. Because the film is meant to be absurd, it would be foolish to go out on a limb and try to say what it is "about." Still you've got to love staring into Ejiofor's passionate eyes when he finally hands his star student his black belt and says, "It's just to hold up your pants!"

It is also hard to miss the digs at Mixed Martial Art's "working class" pretensions, if you want to know more about David Mamet's personal views check out this article from the Village Voice, but be warned--cognitive dissonance may occur.

The world of martial arts that we all know and love has its own logic. If you try to apply Martial Arts Logicâ„¢ to everything else in your life you'll get incongruence, cognitive dissonance, crazy interactions, deep meaning, and simultaneously find superior isolation and brotherhood (or sisterhood) in unexpected places.

Excuse me dear reader, I must leave you now. I have to go fight my way into the kitchen, and through ultimate will power and sacrifice, I will make myself a disciplined sandwich, with maximum power pickles--so that I can fight for freedom, defend honor, and prevail in my duty to bring humor to blog-land.

Training tip

I've decided to add a new category called training tips.  These will obviously consist of preliminary steps one can take to achieve perfection.
Try to connect your arm to the opposite side ribs in everything you practice-- forms, single movement  practice, resistance practice, push-hands, opening the car door, whatever.

The bones naturally spiral in such a way that the opposite side ribs are often more important for support and connection than the same side ribs are.  When using both arms, this practice will give you the feeling that your arms are crossing on the inside--since each arm is extending and contracting from the opposite side ribs simultaneously.

It will also give you the feeling of having more leverage in push-hands because your arm is effectively longer. Enjoy.

Notice: In the picture from DKImages, the force goes from the left forward knuckle to the right side of the upper back.